Manufacturing & The Economy

The monthly Leading Indicators of National Employment (LINE) report from The Society for Human Resource Management (SHRM) says that 50.3% of manufacturers plan to increase their hiring in April, the same rate as one year ago.

Meanwhile, 12.5% of manufacturers plan to decrease employment, up from 7.0% last year. As a result, the net percentage of new hiring in the manufacturing sector dropped 5.5 percentage points from April 2012 to April 2013.

This also represents a deceleration of hiring from March, when 58.0% of manufacturers said that they planned to increase hiring, compared to 8.9% planning to decrease. Net hiring rate for March was 49.1%, suggesting that the pace of net hiring has slowed over the course of the past month (and not just the past year) in the manufacturing sector.

However, it does appear to be getting easier to recruit new manufacturing workers. In March 2012, 18.3% of respondents said that it was more difficult to recruit. In this latest survey, 16.1% continue to see hiring as a challenge.

READ FULL STORY by Chad Moutray, chief economist, National Association of Manufacturers.